Domain flipping is business model where you find a domain related to a keyword that has a high number of searches and low amount of QSR (Quoted Search Results). In this simple case study, I am going to show you how I was able to find a domain name with high search queries and then sell the domain for a quick profit.

The Challenge

To find a .com, .net or .org domain name with high search volume and low amount of website competition and sell the domain name right away in anticipation for profit.

When looking for a keyword specifically with the intention of domain flipping, I usually look for an exact search volume of at least 2000 a month with a QSR of 200 or less.

The Solution

When working on this case study, I didn’t have any set niche in mind. Usually ideas and niches tend to pop in my mind based on my surroundings, so I was confident something was going to come up sooner of later.

Now, during this time, there was a big gaming convention called E3 which I usually like to follow for 2 main reasons:

I am a closet gamer

Video games are a great niche to work on as an affiliate

Xbox was due to announce a big release for it’s staple game called Halo, so my ear was to the ground. To give you an idea of how popular Halo is, they reached an estimated first-day sales of $200 million when Xbox released Halo Reach.

Then they finally announced the release of Halo 4 with a video trailer of the game and immediately, my marketing brain came into play..

Halo 4 Cheats
Halo 4 Walkthrough
Halo 4 Wiki

These are typical search terms for video games, so I simply entered the term Halo 4 into Jaaxy and here is what I got back.

Keyword: Halo 4 Wiki

Monthly Searches:
2,900

QSR:
68

SEO Power:
75

I was actually surprised that there were that many searches for a Halo 4 wiki already with the game not even released yet. I do know that game fans tend to be loyal thus why there were so many searches for information that isn’t even available yet!

The Wiki niche was looking pretty good so I needed to find a domain related to the keyword. Jaaxy has a feature where you can search for available domains right within the application. Here were the results.

The .com was available, so I snagged that up right away for $8 USD.

Once I had the domain, I immediately set it up on some hosting and created a quick blog to give the domain some ‘curb appeal’. I also added the following:

Adding these other social elements to the package, gives the domain more value when selling. I used the Gmail Address to set up all the accounts so it would be easy to transfer everything.

So how much did the domain sell for?

Someone ended up grabbing the ‘domain package’ for $50 which included the domain, the blog and all the other social elements which made me a quick profit of $42.

The time involved with this project was very small as it took me a few minutes for the keyword research, about 30 minutes to buy the domain and set-up the quick blog and an additional 30 minutes to set-up the social elements.

In conclusion, domain flipping doesn’t need to be large scale business model and can easily turn a quick profit over and over again.

People often have the misconception of what qualifies a keyword as being quality, so I am going to hopefully help clarify this once and for all.

Over the years I have dealt with 1,000′s of PPC campaigns and likely a simlilar number of SEO campaigns (on site and off site). The focal point of these campaigns was, you guessed it, KEYWORDS.

First though, what is a keyword?

My definition will make it much easier to understand than some of the convuluted “marketing speak” definitions out there. A keyword is a term that someone searches when they are looking for something.

Nothing more, nothing less. Don’t trick yourself into thinking a keyword is something more complex than it actually is.

How bout’ an example of keyword research?

For more clarification, I want to walk you through a couple of examples that are niche related. I want to start with a clean palette though and start the process without a niche. Then I will work my way towards finding “qual ity keywords”.

I am going to grab a word from one of my past sentences, “palette”. Let’s see what we can come up with:

A totally random search and I have 3 pretty good starting points for niches. The keywords are “not” quality yet though, so lets choose a niche and refine our search here. I will pick something I don’t know ANYTHING about (I hope not), “make up”.

I chose to elaborate on the term “eyeshadow palette” so I clicked on the term in Jaaxy. Here are the corresponding results.

Wow…that is a lot of search results relating to eyeshadow palletes. In fact, I added this to a keyword list to see what my anticipated traffic numbers (monthly) could be if I ranked on the first page of Google for all of these terms.

1348 average searches per month to my “make up” site. These terms will also be very easy to get ranked under, I can tell by looking at the QSR (Quoted Search Results). Quoted search results determine how many rankings in Google and I recommend that you find keywords with under 400 QSR. Let’s take a look at some of the results for the “eyeshadow pallette” keywords and see if they make the QSR cut.

They ALL make the cut!

Value of this research: $1500

If you were to pay for this type of traffic, you could expect to easily spend $1300-$1500 per month. If you spent some time creating content relevant to this on your website or through article marketing efforts, you could get ranked under these terms.

These are “quality” search terms. They have minimal competition (under 400 competiting websites in the world), get a good amount of exact search traffic (over 100 searches per month), and they are all relevant to my [gulp], make up campaign.

I even quickly found a couple of great domains (using the Find Domain function) that I could buy.

largeeyeshadowpalette.com (was available when I wrote this)180eyeshadowpalette.com (was available when I wrote this)brighteyeshadowpalette.com (was available when I wrote this)

Below is an example of the domain search function in Jaaxy that I used to quickly scan domains to see their availability.

You could buy these domains and (a) resell them on the domain marketplace (like flippa.com) for a profit. You could probably fetch $50+ for each of these domains if you have good sales copy and you have the right buyer. That is a profit of $40 per domain.

OR you could build mini-sites on these domains and secure the top rankings in search engines like Google because you have the “keyword rich” domain. Once these sites start getting rankings and traffic you could either flip them (for several $100 depending on traffic), or you could monetize them through advertising, capturing leads, or selling “make-up related” products on them.

A Quick Overview of a Quality Keyword

Here are the question that you need to answer when assessing the quality of a keyword.

(1) Is it relevant to your niche? If you don’t have a use for the keyword, then there is no point in using it. For many people that write about various topics, this is not as critical as they just search for a quality keyword regardless of the niche.

(2) What is the search engine competition? If you are using Jaaxy, you can quickly assess this by looking at the QSR. This reveals exactly how many pages in Google there are competing with you. If there are under 5,000, you can typically get a decent ranking but I usually aim for under 400 QSR. There are many more keywords out there that have limited competition than you problem think (millions!). The lower the QSR the better.

(3) How much traffic does the keyword get? First, you want to make sure that your are searching for EXACT search traffic. This will be the most accurate traffic numbers that you can use at is the “bare minimum” traffic that you can expect out of a keyword. If the keyword has more than 100 searches monthly, then it is a good one. The higher the better.

Those are really the only 3 metrics that you should concern yourself with when doing research. Don’t over think keyword research or you will waste far too much time “analyzing” and not enough time “doing”.